Pastor's
Page By
Fr. George Welzbacher January
7, 2007Filled with
violence, Mel Gibson's new film "Apocalypto" is not a film for young
children; it might trouble them with nightmares. But for teenagers and
adults and perhaps for the precocious middle-school youngster-parents
can best judge the sensitivities of their children-the film transmits a
message that is paradoxically pro-life! Right from the start the
audience is put on notice that there is indeed a message when an
epigraph appears on the screen drawn from Will Durant's massive history
of the civilization of the West to the effect that civilizations that
have collapsed under attack from outside generally had previously grown
rotten from within. As the film unwinds we watch as the villagers
belonging to a primitive tribe of hunters and gatherers living deep
within the jungle are being attacked and taken prisoner by a raiding
army from a much more sophisticated urban culture, that of the Mayas of
central America, just before the arrival of the European
conquistadors. The Mayas (who could boast of an elaborate
system of writing, impressive achievements in architecture and art, and
the world's most efficient calendar to date) had also, like the Aztecs
farther to the north, systematized the brutal and ritualistic mass
murder of helpless members of peripheral tribes. The brutal murder of
the helpless (including ripping the victims' hearts out while the
victims were still alive and then hurling their severed heads down the
steps of lofty pyramids) had brutalized and dehumanized the murderers
themselves. That Mr. Gibson is suggesting an analogy with America's
legalized murder of more than forty million helpless unborn children is
confirmed in an early scene in which, as the villagers are dancing
around their fires in celebration of a successful hunt, the protagonist
places his ear against the bosom of his pregnant wife and exclaims: "I
can hear my son
dancing!" Not "a fetus " or "a clump
of tissue " but "my son"!
Further details from this extraordinary film I will not
disclose. But if you see "Apocalypto" let
me know if you agree that this is not just a stirring and beautifully
photographed high suspense film but it is also a parable with an
admonition for an America that is sowing the seeds of destruction by
its calloused collusion in the slaughter of the unborn.
For a parallel comment on the pre-Columbian culture of the
Mayas may I cite an op-ed article from the January 2nd issue of The New York Times. The article was
written by an anthropologist specializing in the pre-Columbian urban
civilizations of Central and North America.

A Past That Makes Us Squirm
By Craig Childs
A few years back while traveling in the Sierra Madre
Occidental of northern Mexico, I came upon a canyon packed with cliff
dwellings no one had lived in since before the time of Christopher
Columbus. On the ground were discarded artifacts, pieces of frayed
baskets, broken pottery and hundreds of desiccated corn cobs-the ruins
of an ancient civilization.
I reached down to pick up what I thought was a dry gourd, and instead
found myself cradling the skull of a human child. As I turned it
in my hands, I noticed a deliberate hole in in the back of the skull,
directly above the spine. The skull was not cracked around the hole,
which means the child had most likely been alive when a spike of some
other implement had been slammed into his or her head from behind.
This is not the only skull like this. Excavations from elsewhere in
northern Mexico have turned up other children killed the same way,
human sacrifices to an ancient water deity, their bodies buried under
pre-Columbian ball courts or at the foot of pillars in important rooms.
With knowledge of such widespread ferocity, I recently saw Met Gibson's
movie "Apocalypto" which deals with the gore of the Mayan civilization.
I had heard that the movie's violence was wildly out of
control. But even
as I winced at many of the scenes, as a writer and researcher in
ancient American archaeology I found little technical fault with the
film other than ridiculous Hollywood ploys and niggling archaeological
details.
Indeed, parts of the archaeological record of the Americas read like a
war-crimes indictment, with charred skeletons stacked like cordwood and
innumerable human remains missing heads, legs and arms. In the American
Southwest, which is my area of research, human tissue has been found
cooked to the insides of kitchen jars and stained into a ceramic
serving ladle. A grinding stone was found full of crushed human finger
bones. A sample of human feces came up containing the remains of a
cannibal's meal
It could be argued that "Apocalypto"
dehumanizes Native Americans, turning their ancestors into savage
monsters, but I think it does the opposite. Oppressed hunter-gatherers
in the movie are presented as people with the same, universal emotions
all humans share. And with the same, universal emotions all humans
share. And urban Mayans are portrayed as politically and religiously
savvy, having made of themselves a monumental, Neolithic empire,
something more akin to ancient Egypt than the trouble-free agrarians
who come to most people's minds when they think of native America.
To further shatter that popular notion of Native
Americans, there's the scene in which a turquoise-jeweled priest stands
atop a staggering temple yanking out one beating human heart after the
next. That's an
image that nearly every archaeologist working in Central America has
played in his or her head many times, only now it's on the big screen
for everyone to see.
Being told by screenwriters and archaeologists that their
ancestors engaged in death cults tends to make many Native Americans
uneasy. In Arizona, Hopi elders turn their eyes to the ground when they
hear about their own past stained with overt brutality. The name Hopi
means people of peace, which is what they strive to be. Meanwhile,
excavators keep digging up evidence of cannibalism and ritualized
violence among their ancestors.
How do we rectify the age-old perception of noble and
peaceful native Americans with the reality that at times violence was
coordinated on a scale never before witnessed by humanity? The answer
is simple. We don't....